Secrets in the Dust
by PikaCheeka
Summary: Hashirama watches his friend Madara slowly turn to darkness in his fight for superiority. Covers the mangekyou sharingan and his rise to clan head, as well as some background on fathers.


A/N - This is just another fic idea I've had, long in the making, about Madara parents and how he came to have MS, as well as how he came to be clan head. I dashed it out now because the manga may change things (chapter 622 is coming and we all know what that means), so I am definitely not thrilled with this fic and may rework it a bit as time goes on. Not really any spoilers because it's headcanon. PG for implications of violence but that's it. Hashirama and Madara-centric again, though no traces of pairings in this one so rest easy (unlike my other). I'd also like to say that this is first foray into "original characters" beyond a sentence or two. I found this impossible to write without including the fathers of Madara and Hashirama, but I tried to write them in such a way that they didn't feel like original characters. This Madara-father-figure I first dreamed up several years ago pre-Tobi-reveal, as you can probably guess. (and numbering of chapters should be as such)

This is DEFINITELY not of the density, quality, and intensity of my first Founding Era fic, so if you are looking for that (and a HashiMada edge), I'm sorry. I am working on several others and they sound more like my first, so please be patient with me. If you want a better piece, go for my original Founding Era fic is called "Such Little Words that Changed the World" and can be found on my profile as well. And thanks for reading!

**Secrets in the Dust**

**by PikaCheeka**

Sightless, unless / The eyes reappear / As the perpetual star

Multifoliate rose / Of death's twilight kingdom

The hope only / Of empty men.

- Eliot

-1-

"You're clan head?" his voice rung out shrilly through the meeting hall, causing Hashirama to flinch.

Madara's father moved swiftly, not even breaking his gaze on the daimyo while he grabbed his son's face and clamped a clawed glove over his mouth. Madara fought him for a moment, hissing and snarling, but when he realized how impossible it was he quickly gave up, resorting to furiously glaring at Hashirama. The Senju boy bit his lip, suddenly wishing to be anywhere but where he was. He knew in that moment that he was losing Madara, that whatever friendship they had had was rapidly crumbling, and that things could never again go back to what they had once been, all because of what he now wore. The meeting droned on, washing over him like so many waves on the rocks of the Naka river. He heard not a word, not until it was over and he heard that familiar voice, once so caring, again.

"He's head of his clan." Madara spat, pointing at Hashirama again the moment his father relaxed his grip and Madara swatted him away. He was visible shaking with rage.

This was Madara, his best friend, his only friend, really, who he had always believed cared for him just as much as he himself did for the other, now looking at him with such smoldering hatred in his eyes that Hashirama wanted to stand up, throw the necklace symbolizing his leadership on the ground, and reach out to him. He had never thought gaining power would cause him to lose his closest friend. He had naively thought Madara would be glad for him, failing to see, or perhaps pretending not to see, the jealousy the other boy had always felt towards him.

When his father had presented him with a haori and necklace made for the Senju clan head on his fifteenth birthday last month he hadn't been surprised, only nervous and eager to let Madara know. He hadn't had the chance then, as the war dragged on and his clan did not clash with the Uchihas for some time. His father guided him through everything, teaching him what it meant to be head, what he must do when his father's time came to die. But his father had not told him how Madara would react.

"Ignore him. He's a child and you are not," his father whispered, leaning over him.

Hashirama bit his lip and looked at the floor, bitterly wishing that the name had been passed onto his brother, who had looked on with jealousy during the ceremony. Tobirama deserved this. Tobirama had nothing to lose, while Hashirama was rapidly losing everything.

-2-

"Don't blame yourself for his behavior."

Hashirama glanced up as the Uchiha clan head swiftly sat down beside him, not even giving him a chance to react. But Madara's father was simply like that. As unnoticeable as dust, a true shinobi. "He hates me now."

"You are one of the few things in this world Madara does not hate, and that is why he said what he did." He cocked his head to the side and turned towards the Senju boy.

Hashirama finally understood what made him so uncomfortable about the man. It wasn't his demeanor, wraithlike and inhuman as it was. It wasn't his clothing, though he was perpetually dressed in ancient ceremonial garb of the western bird cult that Hashirama knew little of. It wasn't the gloves with talons sewn into them or the eerily smooth and featureless mask he wore. No. It was the fact that there was not one part of the man's body that was visible, not even his eyes. Because in the eyeholes of his mask there was emptiness. Not once in all the years that Hashirama had known him, had he ever seen a glint of light. Madara's father was blind, his eyes either sewn shut or entire non-existent, yet he behaved in such a way that nobody could ever tell.

"You're...blind, aren't you?"

The man sitting next to him tilted his head and nodded slowly.

"You can be healed, you know. Just ask my-"

Madara's father held up a hand and stopped him. "No need. My hurt can not be healed, not normally. The Uchiha have...unique ways of healing blindness, as with so many other things, such as gaining power."

"What do you mean?"

"I could have healed myself, but after I realized that my second child was a son, I declined."

"Was it because your wife died then?" Hashirama shifted nervously. The man unnerved him, for then he laughed coldly. The boy wondered for a moment if Madara had lied to him about his mother dying in childbirth, or perhaps he was not meant to tell anyone at all.

"No. I carry her with me; as far as I am concerned, she died just as much as she had ever lived." He shook his head. "It was because I didn't want Madara to know such things."

He was struggling to piece things together, but things did not fit. "He was...my age. He wouldn't know."

"If I did not know my son by the time he was four I would not be his father."

"Why couldn't you just heal your eyes and tell him?" He wanted to ask what Izuna had to do with it, why Madara's father seemed to fear him, what Madara could not know, but he was afraid to, because he was afraid he knew the answers.

"You don't know Madara." He stood up swiftly, his cloak of feathers and rings falling around him, and strode from the room.

The Senju boy listened to his feet patter away into silence down the singing hall, gone far too fast for comfort, as if they had never been there at all, and breathed out again. Hashirama didn't realize until after he was gone that he'd been clenching his fists so tightly that they ached. He slowly relaxed, opening them to find tiny crescents of blood where his nails had dug into his palm. Unwittingly, he reached his hand up and flinched at the metallic taste of his blood.

-0-

When he sought out the younger boy the next day, before his clan was to move out, he was startled to see Madara sitting with his father in the gardens. He had rarely seen them together, rarely seen his father at all except during clan meetings with the daimyos. He never even appeared on the battlefield to aid his sons. Hashirama was afraid to step forward, to call attention to himself, because while he suspected Madara's father knew he was there, his friend did not. Madara slept, pressed tightly to his father's side, nothing akin to the teenager who had raged and swore before the daimyo of the Fire Country for hours only the day before.

He watched the older Uchiha gently stroke Madara's head for a long moment, wondering absently what words, if any, were whispered when the man pressed his mask to his son's ear and Madara stirred. He hadn't expected it, instead always assuming that his father, while hardly cruel, simply cared little for his son. But he again remembered his words, that the man had suffered blindness these last twelve years simply to protect his children from something unknown. This was a man who would do anything for his son, perhaps even more than his own father would do for him.

The thought suddenly disturbed him, and he stepped back. He would not speak to Madara again for some time, as the Uchihas moved out before he had a chance to. It was something he regretted forever, just one more in a long line of bitterly regretted moments that, in the end, seemed to be all he had left of Uchiha Madara. He believed he could have stopped him, stopped everything, and it was something he struggled to believe until he held Madara to his chest, watching him bleed out in his death throes before turning away, letting him die alone, because he could never accept that he did not save him.

-1-

Hashirama could scarcely comprehend what he saw when Madara entered the room. This was not the Madara he knew. He looked older, as if he had aged several years in only a month, his eyes sunken even further into his skull and his face gaunt and pale. He looked colder, and Hashirama saw then, without truly understanding, that Madara had taken that first, inevitable step towards his own destruction. There would be no going back now. Madara had changed, had turned from everything Hashirama knew, and was heading into that irrevocable darkness that the Senju knew had plagued him since the day they met, so many years ago.

For he donned the robes of the Uchiha head, redesigned for his height but still far too large for him. Again, the feathers of crows were pressed to his scalp, just as they were when Hashirama first met him so many years ago, his falconer guards were now stitched with purple, and two masks hanging from his obi beside his sword, that of a tengu obscuring the second.

He raised his chin and smirked at the Senju boy. "Now we are equals."

Hashirama realized then that Madara did not look older. No. He looked younger, like a child masquerading as an adult, desperately trying to convince all around him that he was adequate, that he deserved this title, and that he was just as good as the Senju boy before him. Yet despite all of that, there was something cruel and viciously attractive, seductive even, about him, and Hashirama understood why the clan rallied behind him. This was Uchiha Madara. This was his friend. His rival. And now, because of the robes he now wore with such angry pride, his mortal enemy.

-2-

He knew Madara would be waiting for him outside the daimyo's garden, beneath the tree that they had played under so long ago, one of the first trees that Hashirama had ever grown not to impress an adult, but show a friend.

He advanced slowly, suddenly uncertain of the boy before him. He didn't know who he was any longer, didn't know where they stood, because in all of his dreams of finally becoming the clan head, it had never occurred to him that Madara might step forward to match him, and that it would irrevocably tear them apart. Because you could not be friends in such a position. And he again despised himself for not realizing sooner Madara's pride and fear of being left behind, of his voracious desire to excel.

"Where is your father?"

"He's dead," Madara smiled calmly, his cold eyes flashing to a brilliant red for the barest of moments before repeating his earlier words. "Now we are equals."

And Hashirama remembered the hollow sound of footsteps in the hall, the last spoken words settling in the dust of that evening now long ago.

And he remembered the bitter taste of blood on his hand.

-end-


End file.
